Haiti and sweatshops…

“Haiti exports nearly 200 million T-shirts each year to the United States, T-shirts stitched by factory workers reportedly making as little as 18 cents an hour. Like children who must make do with mud cookies, these garment workers must make do with a starvation wage – wages even lower than their parents earned working in similar factories 25 years ago….To acquire these factory jobs entire families must move away from rural regions to cities like Port-au-Prince, squeezing into squalid slums of wobbly concrete houses that barely keep off the rain, let alone withstand an earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale….But when the bodies are buried and the streets cleared, will we [the United States] continue to exploit Haiti as a source of cheap labor and an outlet for our agricultural surplus?”